The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants (35 page)

Absorbed with Bulgakov’s career, Elena merely wondered whether Kirov had been to the theater lately, in which case it was possible that the last play he saw in life was
The Turbins
. She was busy preparing for Christmas and had made big purchases for their new apartment—a piano for the living room and an antique bureau, which had belonged to Alexander I, for Bulgakov’s study. She bought it at a sale of Imperial furniture and was immensely proud of it. Bulgakov, who felt himself a nineteenth-century man, loved working at it.

Christmas had been outlawed by the Bolsheviks, along with other religious holidays, but at the Bulgakovs’ apartment it was noisily celebrated: the couple erected a tree, lit candles, and laid presents for the boys. Bulgakov played the march on the piano and the boys strode into the room. “There were wild squeals, clattering and shouts! Then, according to the program, there were performances.”
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They celebrated with music and Elena’s wish that the New Year bring no bad news.

In January 1935, Elena still walked Bulgakov to the theater. She had arranged a hypnotherapy treatment for Bulgakov with a Moscow celebrity, Dr. Berg, to ease his phobias and anxiety. The doctor came to their apartment in early February; after a few sessions, he told Elena that he was happy to have cured his favorite writer. Bulgakov proclaimed the treatment a great success and for the first time in half a year walked to the theater alone: hypnosis alleviated his dread of open spaces.

Meantime, he was writing a biographical play about Pushkin for the centennial of his death in 1937. To secure the play’s approval, he asked his friend Veresaev to collaborate. The older writer was a renowned Pushkin scholar and had an untarnished political reputation. Enthusiastic about the project, Elena took dictation, helped with research, and even made an independent scholarly contribution, deciphering a note of the poet Vasily Zhukovsky, Pushkin’s friend. She delivered her report to a gathering at Veresaev’s home, receiving commendation. The play focused on Pushkin’s last years, his marriage, and tragic death in a duel. With that, Bulgakov’s play
offered a rare sympathetic treatment of Pushkin’s wife, Natalya. For almost a century, Natalya had been blamed for her lack of interest in the poet’s work and for his untimely death, while Bulgakov gave her voice as his muse and the mother of his children. Elena was happy with the play and, although she knew it by heart, continued to be moved by each reading. She also supported Bulgakov through the difficulties of working with a co-author. Upon completing the play, Bulgakov wrote a friend, “Lyusya [Elena] is now tapping energetically at the typewriter.… I put my hand on Lyusya’s shoulder to restrain her. She has worn herself out and shared all the excitement with me, burrowing into bookshelves with me and turning pale when I was reading it to the actors.”
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Simultaneously, Elena tried to hasten production of the Molière play, still being rehearsed by the Arts Theater after several years. She had an informal talk with an official, named Egorov, whose job at the theater was to greet government delegations and look after contracts; she mentioned that rehearsals of Bulgakov’s play were dragging on, without any end in sight. Alarmed, Egorov began to look for those responsible for the delay and urged the fearful directors to speed things up. In May, Elena received a long-awaited call from her sister, informing her that the theater wanted to perform the play early next year. “Victory!” she wrote in her diary.

In the West, interest in Bulgakov was growing since an American journal labeled
The Turbins
the first Soviet non-propaganda play and praised him as a comedic playwright. Charles E. Bohlen, a secretary at the American Embassy in Moscow, wanted to translate Bulgakov’s comedy
Zoika’s Apartment
. (Bohlen, later Roosevelt’s interpreter at wartime meetings with Stalin, was an expert on Russian affairs.) The Bulgakovs invited Bohlen to their house for a reading and supper, and he came with a translator, Emmanuil Zhukhovitsky. (He was actually an informer who collected information on foreigners and prominent Russians. An unwelcome guest at the Bulgakovs’ apartment, he had been there time and again to snoop on their conversations.) Elena shone as a hostess, treating her guests to caviar, salmon, home-made pâté, vodka, and pies. Before beginning
to read the play, Bulgakov showed Bohlen his new application to travel abroad, at which time Zhukhovitsky choked on a pie. “But the Americans said it was wonderful and we must go.” The couple was beginning to dream about the United States.

The Bulgakovs were also invited to a ball at the American Embassy; and a note specified that men had to wear tails or dinner jackets. Since Bulgakov had neither, they had to urgently tailor him a black suit at great expense. Elena anticipated the April 23 ball with great curiosity. She was ravishing in her dark-blue dress with pale pink flowers.

Never in my life have I seen such a ball. The Ambassador stood at the top of the stairs to greet his guests. Everyone was wearing tails, and there were only a few jackets and smoking-jackets.… There were people dancing in a hall with columns, floodlights shining down from the gallery, and behind a net which separated off the orchestra there were live pheasants and other birds. We had supper at separate tables in an enormous dining-room with live bear-cubs in one corner, kid goats, and cockerels in cages. There were accordion players during supper.
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Among prominent people they met were the famous director Vsevolod Meyerhold and his wife, actress Zinaida Reich; politician and editor of
Izvestiya
Nikolai Bukharin, and Soviet Marshal and Commander-in-Chief Mikhail Tukhachevsky. All would soon be destroyed in the purges, along with the rest of the artistic, military, and government elite. In
The Master and Margarita
, Bulgakov would depict the ball as a grand Satan’s ball, attended by corpses; the Devil’s arrival in contemporary Moscow reflects the prison-like hell into which the country was descending.

Early in the morning, the couple was returning home in an Embassy car, Elena with a bouquet of tulips from Bohlen. They were accompanied by Baron Boris Shteiger, known around Moscow as “our home GPU” (State Political Department), as Elena describes
him in her diary. Shteiger was in charge of foreign relations at the Commissariat for Education; he was also a secret police agent whose duties included spying on foreign diplomats and the artistic elite. He listened to the couple’s conversation about people they had met at the embassy. Shteiger would surface in Bulgakov’s novel as Baron Maigel, “in charge of acquainting foreigners with places of interest in the capital.” The spy was liquidated in 1937 along with the Commissar for Education, Andrei Bubnov.

During one evening in November, to lift their spirits, the Bulgakovs went to the National Hotel, the best in the city, for supper and a dance. Upon arriving, they discovered the restaurant almost empty, no musicians, and only a group of foreigners eating at a table in the corner. Soon after, the couple found they were being watched: a young man took a table nearby and whispered with the waiter but did not order a meal. As he sat there staring at them, Bulgakov remarked, “That’s for my soul.” The couple would never return to this hotel, frequented by foreigners and by secret police, and would remember how the young man unashamedly followed them outside.

Bulgakov and Elena yearned for a vacation beyond the Soviet borders. They applied to go abroad for three months and as a pledge of their return were leaving the boys behind. But the authorities again denied Bulgakov permission to travel and see his plays in Paris and New York. He now realized it was not destined for him to “see the world.” His father had died at forty-eight from nephrosclerosis, a kidney disease caused by hypertension, which Bulgakov believed he had inherited. He told Elena, shortly after they married, that he would die of the same disease and that he did not expect to outlive his father. She was alarmed, but, since doctors did not find anything wrong with Bulgakov, dismissed her fears. Bulgakov, however, did not allow her to forget: they would be sitting with guests and in the middle of their merriment, he would suddenly say, “‘You are lucky to enjoy life, while I’ll be dead soon.’ And he would go on to describe his imminent death, but in such a comic way that it was impossible for all of us not to laugh. And I was first to burst out
laughing.”
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In May of 1935, Bulgakov turned forty-four and his stories of how he would die became more recurrent.

On October 30, Akhmatova visited the couple: looking shaken and confused, she said her son Lev and her husband, the art historian Nikolai Punin,
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had been arrested on the same night. Lev was arrested for the second time, and his only “crime” was being Akhmatova’s son. Elena had never seen Akhmatova in such a pitiful state. She had come to consult Bulgakov, whom many considered an expert on writing letters to Stalin, about how to compose her petition. Bulgakov offered suggestions, such as to keep her letter short and make it hand-written. Two days later, again at their door, Akhmatova showed them a telegram telling of her family’s release. Pasternak had also helped, having written Stalin on Akhmatova’s behalf. Her son Lev, however, would be re-arrested three years later.

That year, the Bulgakovs met Pasternak at a birthday party where he recited his translations of Georgian poems. With pressure on writers to conform, Pasternak had stopped creating original work and earned his living as a translator. Elena thought Pasternak was unlike anyone else she had met and admired his dreamy-like style of rendering poetry. But most of all she liked the fact that he valued Bulgakov. Ignoring other writers, Pasternak made the first toast to Bulgakov, explaining that while others were officially recognized, Bulgakov was “an unlawful phenomenon.”

That fall, Elena printed Bulgakov’s new comedy,
Ivan Vasilievich
, about an engineer who built a time machine and transported his contemporaries to the epoch of Ivan the Terrible. Ironically, the theme was popular during Stalin’s reign, despite the obvious analogy between two reigns of terror. The initial reception of his play was warm, and the reading at the Satire Theater followed “with huge success.” In the Repertoire Committee, the play was examined by several censors. Unable to find anything suspicious, they made a marvelous suggestion: “Is it possible for Ivan the Terrible to say that things are better now than they were then?”
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(Bulgakov did not heed this advice.) When the play was licensed, Elena felt Bulgakov’s
career was finally gaining momentum since, a month earlier, his Pushkin play had also been approved for performance. In addition, Sergey Prokofiev wanted to write an opera about Pushkin based on the play. Within a few months, Dmitry Shostakovich also considered it for an opera. He joined the couple for lunch at their house. After Bulgakov read from the play, Shostakovich performed his waltz and polka from
The Bright Stream
.

After more than four years of rehearsals,
Molière
premiered on February 16, 1936. It was a stunning success, with twenty-two curtain calls. Elena, victorious, reported events in her diary, “And so, the official premiere of
Molière
has taken place. How many years we have waited for it! The auditorium was, as Molière puts it, larded with distinguished persons … there were lots of academics, doctors, actors and writers.”
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The Americans in the audience “were entranced” with the play, and their ambassador, William Bullitt, called Bulgakov “a master.” A young fan approached Elena upon learning she was the author’s wife, kissed her hand, and told her that “we students are tremendously happy that Bulgakov’s work is again on stage.…” Throughout that month,
Molière
was performed to full houses, with a “resounding triumph.” Simultaneously, a harassment campaign began in the press, led by the same critics and dramatists who previously had attacked Bulgakov. Motivated by political opportunism and personal envy, they demanded that the play be closed because it was “extraneous to the Soviet stage.” On March 9,
Pravda
published an unsigned article, “Superficial Glitter and False Content,” which spelled out the end of
Molière
and the end of Bulgakov’s career as a playwright. That same day, the theater directors canceled the play, without even attempting to defend Bulgakov. “Here I will enter a large black cross,” wrote Elena in her diary, referring to the final lines of her husband’s play where Molière, out of favor with the king and hunted down by the Cabal, dies after performing his own play at the theater. “Misha’s [Bulgakov’s] fate is clear to me,” she continued; “he will be alone and persecuted until the end of his days.”
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The comedy about Ivan the Terrible,
Ivan Vasilievich
, was banned next. In the middle of the dress rehearsal at the Satire Theater, an official from the Moscow Party Committee arrived and, without taking off his coat, passed on the stock phrase to the director, “I don’t advise you to produce it.” In mid-March, attacks on
Pushkin
were launched, which meant this play would be also banished. Meantime,
The Turbins
was being produced in London and about to be staged in Norway, but the news from abroad did little to alleviate the doom the couple felt. “A difficult time for us,” wrote Elena in her diary in March. “It’s quiet, sad, and hopeless here after the death of
Molière,”
Bulgakov told a friend.
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The staff at the Arts Theater pressed Bulgakov to write a repentant letter to the government, admitting his mistakes. Elena shielded Bulgakov from a flurry of phone calls from actors and her own sister proposing that he do just that. Elena retorted Bulgakov had nothing to repent. Theater administration demanded the return of an advance for the banned play
Flight
. Undaunted, Elena replied, “Show me the ban.” Although there was no paper trail, the theater continued to insist that they return the money. By then, the couple was seventeen thousand rubles in debt, having lived for months on these advances and on the money they borrowed from friends.